3 easy tips for a healthy relationship with food

It’s been a very busy few months over at Healthy Beautiful Me – my personal health and fitness website. I’ve been spending lots of time getting creative in the kitchen and writing my healthy eating guide.

Beating disordered eating and illness through good food
After playing around with my diet for years, suffering from disordered eating, IBS, CFS and food intolerances, I finally decided to make health my priority. Eating the right foods and adopting a healthy lifestyle was key to this and the foundation behind a happy, healthy and nourished life. Healthy Beautiful Food, my new book, is ultimately the outcome of my experiences. A book that gives you all the recipes you need to create a healthy eating food plan, alongside healthy eating tips, facts and nutritional advice.

The book itself features all the recipes I use to create my monthly food plans and offers vegetarian alternatives for each meal, as required. It’s not so much a diet plan in the traditional sense of the term, but more a healthy lifestyle handbook, which you can follow long-term to look and feel your best.

Three healthy food habits

In this blog, I wanted to share an excerpt from the book with you. The three tips on the next page are just some of the nuggets of advice I share in the book in the section that looks at maintaining a healthy relationship with food. I hope these tips alone can help you to re-assess any poor eating habits and give you a taster of the material I cover in Healthy Beautiful Food.

1) Don’t skip meals

So you’ve gone out for an epic four course meal last night and feel like you’ve put on a few pounds, probably should skip breakfast then shouldn’t you? NO!

Skipping meals can often have exactly the opposite results to the ones you intended. Instead of lowering your calorie intake for the day, you’ll most likely eat more, as your body will get so hungry that absolutely anything goes. That means if the nearest thing available at 11am is a bar of chocolate, you’ll probably eat it!

Skipping meals often leads to calorie loading at other meal times later that day. Eating little and often should always be the strategy you take for a healthy lifestyle - it continuously revs up your metabolism, keeping you slimline and hunger-free. And don’t get me started on the effects skipping meals have on your brain and work performance...

2) Remember to plan your meals…

I’ve already said this before, but it really is something worth remembering and keeping to. Planning your meals saves your time, helps prevent you from making bad food choices and guarantees that you will always have healthy meal and snack options available at home. It makes the move to a healthy beautiful lifestyle so much easier.

3) But don’t be afraid to make changes

So you’ve created your weekly or monthly menu - good for you! Then you get an invitation to your best friend’s birthday do. Problem is, it really doesn’t fit in with your meal plan…

In these situations I always advise that you go out and enjoy yourself. A monthly or fortnightly meal out isn’t going to sabotage your diet and nowadays there are plenty of healthier alternatives available at restaurants. Eating healthily definitely doesn’t equal a restrictive and lonely lifestyle. One day of dieting never made anyone thin - so one meal out once every so often certainly won’t make you fat.

• Over 30 easy, simple, tasty recipes (breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts)
• Guidance on all the meals above plus snacks
• Vegetarian options for each meal
• Nutritional tips and advice
• Weekly meal planner
• Handy shopping list

Interested in my e-book? Hop on over to my website and get your healthy lifestyle handbook.